available for all cases and in all countries, let
us at least rejoice that there is, on any one spot
of earth, such a harbour of refuge for some poor
rudderless ships, that without it must have
been total wrecks.

AMONG OUR GREAT GRANDFATHERS.

DON MANUEL ALVAREZ ESPRIELLA crossed
over from Spain, in the year 1802, in the same
packet boat or little barge wherein our countryman
Chaucer once travelled to and from an
island of fair women walled with glass.

    Which barge was as a man's thought,
    After his pleasure to him brought.

Builder and steersman of the barge that
brought over Don Manuel for a holiday with
our great-grandfathers, was Robert Southey.
Southey, in the first strength of his manhood,
was at work upon Kirke White's Remains,
Memorials of the Cid, Palmerin of England, a
History of Portugal, Specimens of English
Poetry, was printing his Madoc, writing his
Kehama, while chuckling to himself and his
friends over his Don Manuel Espriella, through
whom he was giving his countrymen what he
could of the giftie to see themselves as others
see them. His mythical Don was a Spanish
Catholic gentleman, who landed at Falmouth in
April, 1802, and during a tour in England
wrote to his family and to his father confessor
letters describing his impressions of this country
and its people. Southey was not tolerant of
Catholics. "I am for abolishing the test," he
said, "with regard to every other sect, Jews
and all, but not to Catholics. They will not
tolerate." So when his pleasant Don described
the usages of the benighted Protestants,
although his character was well enough preserved
to mystify many a reader, Southey took good
care to make his satire cut both ways. So
many people really were mystified by the three
volumes gravely entitled "Letters from
England: by Don Manuel Alvarez Espriella.
Translated from the Spanish," that to this day some
vague belief that the book is only a translation,
keeps it out of its rights as one of the
pleasantest and most individual of Southey's excellent
prose writings. "The book will be very
amusing," he wrote to his brother at sea,
Lieutenant Tom, "and promises more profit than
any of my former works." And then, with an
eye to material, "I want you grievously to tell
Espriella stories about the navy, and give him a
good idea of its present state. Some of your
own stories you will recognise." After his
three volumes were out, the work of his choice
would have been to go on with more in the
same vein: "What I feel most desirous to do, is
to send Espriella again on his travels, and so
complete my design. But this must not be unless he
hits the fancy of the public." But Espriella's
letters were ten years getting into a third
edition, which was less success than had been
looked for. The humour, serving a good social
purpose, was too dry and quiet; the suggestion
of a real Don, helped with ingeniously mystifying
notes which professed to come from his
translator, was too true to life; and so the
book passed only with the quick-witted for what
it was—a shrewd picture of the social state of
England, painted with wholesome purpose by a
lively Englishman from an outsider's point of
view. The book has improved by keeping; for
it now takes us upon a holiday tour through
the England of our great-grandfathers, and
enables us to measure progress by comparison
of England as it is, with England as it was in
the beginning of the present century.
After some troublesome custom house experience,
and a warning to Don Manuel from his
English friend not to judge England by her
seaports, for "the people at these places are all
either birds of passage or birds of prey," the
Don found a Falmouth inn magnificent, although
his friends complained that it was dirty and
uncomfortable. But he could not relish the food
of the islanders: they ate their meat, he said,
half raw; the vegetables were never boiled
enough to be soft, and everything was insipid
except the bread, which was salt, bitter, and
disagreeable. Wine at inns he found, as he would
still find it, in general, miserably bad; the
customers knew this, and yet drank, that the host
might be satisfied with their expenses. So far
our ways are little changed by the course of the
century, but the blessings of the old posting
system are recalled, as Don Manuel goes on to
report, that the perpetual stir and bustle in this
inn was as surprising as it was wearisome.
Doors opening and shutting, bells ringing,
voices calling to the waiter from every quarter,
while he cried "Coming" to one room, and
hurried away to another. Everybody was in a
hurry; either they were going off in the packets,
and were hastening their preparations to
embark, or they had just arrived and were
impatient to be on the road homeward. Every
now and then, a carriage rattled up to the door
with a rapidity which made the very house
shake. The man who cleaned the boots was
running in one direction; the barber with his
powder-bag in another; here, went the barber's
boy with his hot water and razor; there came
the clean linen from the washerwoman, and the
hall was full of porters and sailors bringing in
luggage or bearing it away. Now, they heard a
horn blow, because the post was coming in; and
in the middle of night they were awakened by
another, because it was going out. Nothing
was done without a noise, and yet noise was the
only thing forgotten in the bill. It gratified the
Don to be drawn by two horses at the rate of a
league and a half in the hour. In two hours
he reached Truro, where his breakfast was spoilt
by the abominable bitterness of the bread. The
town, clean and opulent; its main street broad,
with superb shops, and a little gutter stream
running through it. Through chilly weather,
and over a track as dreary as any in Estremadura,
he reached Mitchel-Dean, which was what
they called a rotten borough—that is, it had the